On 1/9/14 5:44 PM, Florian Pflug wrote:
On Jan9, 2014, at 14:57 , Dean Rasheed <dean.a.rash...@gmail.com> wrote:
On 19 December 2013 08:05, Pavel Stehule <pavel.steh...@gmail.com> wrote:
length should be irrelevant to fact so array starts from 1, 0 or anything
else

Yes, this should just return the number of elements, and 0 for an empty array.

+1. Anything that complains about arrays whose lower bound isn't 1 really
needs a *way* less generic name than array_length().

Problem is, if you're operating on an array which could have a lower bound that isn't 1, why would you look at the length in the first place? You can't access any elements by index, you'd need to look at array_lower(). You can't iterate over the array by index, you'd need to do array_lower() .. array_lower() + array_length(), which doesn't make sense. And then there's the myriad of stuff you can do with unnest() without actually having to look at the length. Same goes for multi-dimensional arrays: you have even less things you can do there with only a length.

So if we give up these constraints, we also make this function completely useless.


Regards,
Marko Tiikkaja


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